Pro-abortion activists who hijacked everyone’s favorite Mexican food to fund abortions have raised nearly $30,000.
The Taco or Beer Challenge began in August after abortion advocate Andrea Grimes saw how effective the viral Ice Bucket Challenge for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) was. In case you missed it, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was a social media movement in which participants were challenged to either donate $100 to ALS research or film themselves dumping a bucket of ice over their heads, then tag a few more people to do the same. Most people opted to do both, flooding YouTube and Facebook with increasingly elaborate ice bucket videos while raising millions of dollars for research for the rare, incurable disease.
The Ice Bucket Challenge had its critics, since most of the money was funneled to an ALS organization that has a history of support for embryonic stem cell research, but it’s difficult to dispute that most participants’ hearts were in the right place, and that the challenge had a tremendous impact on public awareness of ALS. Because of that, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would try to reproduce the success of the project.
What was less expected was that someone would use the idea to try and raise money for abortions.
Grimes’ challenge was simple: Film yourself eating a taco or drinking a beer (or both), and donate to an abortion fund. In fact, she really didn’t care about the taco or the beer – Chinese food would work, too. Really, you could eat anything, or nothing, as long as you donated to an organization that funds women’s abortions. As Grimes wrote in her recap of the 3-month project, “The only way to lose the Taco or Beer Challenge … was to not donate to an abortion fund.”
Grimes was quite clear that just donating to pro-abortion advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood or NARAL was not enough. As she wrote on the Tumblr account she created for the project (WARNING: profane language), “winning the Taco Or Beer Challenge depends entirely on you donating to an abortion fund, which is a fund that pays for people’s abortions or directly related logistical expenses.”
“Why are abortion funds so important, and why are they the sole non-negotiable part of the Taco Or Beer Challenge?” Grimes wrote. “Because abortion stigma is real, and the Taco Or Beer Challenge is about encouraging people to give abortion stigma a big f—ing taco-covered middle finger by being loud and proud about directly funding abortion.”
“Because abortion stigma is real, I know it can be hard to make that first abortion fund donation,” Grimes wrote in the blog post that launched the campaign. “It’s one thing to support abortion in theory, and a whole other thing to actually help pay for someone else’s—a total stranger’s, most likely—abortion.”
But Grimes tried to reassure her readers. “Abortion is common. Abortion is normal. … There’s nothing shameful about having an abortion, and nothing shameful about funding abortion. It’s so not-shameful, in fact, that you can be the kind of regular ol’ human being who eats a taco or drinks a beer and funds abortion.”
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Grimes highlighted the fact that even babies “participated” in the challenge, posting a link to a photo of an abortion supporter posing happily with a taco as an infant sits unsmiling in her lap.
While the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge drew in literally millions of participants from around the world and raised nearly $100 million in a single month, the Taco Or Beer Challenge’s impact was far more modest. Over the course of three months, around 200 participants raised a grand total of $29,836 to pay for women’s abortions.
Still, Grimes proclaimed the effort a “massive, tasty success.”
“The National Network of Abortion Funds raised more than $10,000 in a little more than a month after the challenge began in August—six times what the organization raised during the same period last year,” Grimes reported. Additionally, Texas’ Lilith Fund raised $5,000, the D.C. Abortion Fund raised $3,100, the CAIR Project raised $945 – enough to buy six abortions, Grimes noted – and the New York Abortion Access Fund raised $1,260.
Grimes says she plans to launch another Taco Or Beer Challenge to raise money for more abortions next August.